Partners from Around the World Recognised for Delivering Solutions for the Software-Defined Datacentre

Aptronics today announced that it has been named the Global recipient of a VMware Partner Network Award in the Emerging Markets category. The award was presented at VMware Partner Exchange 2013, VMware’s annual partner event, on Feb. 26 in Las Vegas.

“We are pleased to recognise the outstanding achievements made in 2012 by members of the VMware partner ecosystem, particularly those partners serving our global customers,” said Chris Norton, regional director, Southern Africa, VMware. “VMware Partner Exchange is dedicated to educating and equipping our partner ecosystem with the resources and insights they need to help deliver first class solutions for the software-defined datacentre in the coming year. We congratulate Aptronics on winning a VMware Partner Network Award and we look forward to our mutual success in 2013.”

“We are delighted to have received this award from VMware,” said Ken Marsden, chief technology officer, Aptronics. “The VMware platform is a key component of the solutions we bring to our customers, and as a result we continue to invest significantly into developing our skills and competencies around it. This award acknowledges our efforts and drives our ongoing vision to continue to support the VMware platform as a strategic component of what we deliver to our customers. It also strengthens our decision to create a new program called, VMXperts, focussing on the delivery of VMware solutions.”

This is the second VMware award received by Aptronics in 2012. The company was recently awarded the Highest Achiever of VMware Competencies award for the EMEA region at VMworld® 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. This achievement recognised Aptronics for attaining all of the required competencies needed to fulfil customer needs around the VMware solution-set.

Partner recipients of a VMware Partner Network Award were acknowledged by VMware in 19 categories for their excellence in performance and distinctive achievements during 2012:

Cambium Networks, a world-class provider of wireless broadband and microwave solutions, is firmly setting its sights on Kenya and Nigeria. “There are exciting opportunities for growth in Sub-Saharan Africa with Kenya expanding in the Internet Service Provider (ISP) and power utility market in addition to Nigeria venturing into the ISP space (WISP) market, with both countries experiencing good general growth,” says Tony Rodrigues, Regional Sales Manager at Cambium Networks.

Cambium Networks, formerly part of Motorola Solutions, celebrated its first year of existence in November 2012 with the company showing significant growth. “A good percentage of our revenue is generated in South Africa with a fair share of revenue originating from Sub-Saharan countries. “We will continue to channel our efforts into growing our footprint into Sub-Saharan Africa during 2013 with key focus areas including countries such as Nigeria, Kenya, Zambia, Angola and Mozambique,” says Rodrigues.

“Our immediate aim is to build our reseller and channel network to increase availability of our products across the continent. The Cambium Networks point-to-point (PTP) and point-to-multi-point (PMP) solutions offer the bandwidth, flexibility, ease of installation and the cost effectiveness that will ensure high-speed access to users,” says Rodrigues.

South Africa’s continued broadband adoption is mostly attributable to decreasing costs and readily availability access to wireless broadband services. “There is however a growing need for capacity with ISPs having to contend with the ever-increasing needs of a burgeoning customer base. ISPs are certainly facing a unique set of challenges, having to navigate the realities of shrinking revenue while still addressing the growing capacity needs in their service offering,” explains Rodrigues.

Affordable products in the space are key to the survival and growth of the market. “Service providers will need to diversify their offering to provide products that are priced to suit the pocket of the client, whether they choose to purchase or use the equipment on an IT as a service (ITaaS) basis,” concludes Rodrigues.

EMEA Server Shipments and Revenue Declined in the Fourth Quarter of 2012

In the fourth quarter of 2012, worldwide server shipments declined 0.2 per cent year-on-year, while revenue increased 5.1 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2011, according to Gartner, Inc. For year-end results, worldwide server shipments grew 1.5 per cent in 2012, and server revenue declined 0.6 per cent.

“2012 was a year that definitely saw budgetary constraint which resulted in delays in x86-based server replacements in enterprise and mid-sized data centres,” said Jeffrey Hewitt, research vice president at Gartner. “Application-as-a-business data centres such as Baidu, Facebook and Google were the real drivers of significant volume growth for the year.”

From a geographic perspective, the three highest growth rates were shown by North America (5.5 per cent), Asia/Pacific (3.4 per cent) and Latin America (0.2 per cent) in terms of unit shipments. These were the only regions to experience an increase in shipments. These three regions grew at a rate of 16.3, 15.5 and 6 per cent respectively.

IBM extended its lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue in the fourth quarter of 2012 (see Table 1). In the fourth quarter, IBM’s server revenue reached $5.1 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012 to increase its global market share to 34.9 per cent. This was up from 33.7 per cent market share in the fourth quarter in 2011.

Three of the top five global server vendors experienced revenue growth in the fourth quarter of 2012, with IBM showing the strongest growth rate of 8.9 per cent, while Oracle had the steepest revenue decline of 18 per cent.

Worldwide: Server Vendor Revenue Estimates, 4Q12 (US Dollars)

In server shipments, HP remained the worldwide leader for the fourth quarter of 2012 (see Table 2), as it accounted for 26.5 per cent of the market. HP’s shipments declined 5.9 per cent. The ProLiant brand remains as HP’s significant driver of server unit volume.

Of the top five vendors in server shipments worldwide, Cisco was the only vendor to experience an increase in shipments in the fourth quarter of 2012. Cisco’s worldwide server shipments increased 40.9 per cent in the quarter.

The results for the quarter were centred around x86 server demand which increased in shipments by 0.2 per cent and revenue by 6.6 per cent for the fourth quarter of 2011.

Worldwide: Server Vendor Shipments Estimates, 4Q12 (Units)

Full Year 2012 Server Market Results
The year of 2012 demonstrated server revenue growth in spite of relative softness in some regions—most notably Western Europe. These results were fuelled primarily by x86 servers which are the predominant platform used for large scale data centre build outs, particularly in North America, while emerging regions such as Asia/Pacific and Latin America also added to the growth for the year.

Blade servers posted a revenue increase of 3.2 per cent but a shipment decline of 3.8 per cent for the year. HP was the 2012 leader with blades with 43.9 per cent shipment share. IBM was in second place at 18.4 per cent. Cisco grew to 12.5 per cent shipment share for the year to end in third place.

The outlook for 2013 suggests that modest growth will continue. These increases continue to be buffered by the use of x86 server virtualization to consolidate physical machines as they are replaced. Some replacements are likely to begin in the enterprise segment as servers continue to age and economies improve.

EMEA 4Q12 Results
In Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), server shipments totalled nearly 630,000 units in the fourth quarter of 2012, a decrease of 10.4 per cent from the same period last year (see Table 3). Server revenue totalled $3.8 billion in the quarter, a decline of 7.4 per cent year-on-year (see Table 4).

“EMEA was once again the weak spot for global server sales,” said Adrian O’Connell, research director at Gartner. “Each of the three EMEA sub-regions saw revenue contract with Western Europe declining 7.9 per cent, Eastern Europe 7.3 per cent and the Middle East and Africa region down 3.7 per cent. Without the strong growth of the hyperscale segment that is benefiting the North American markets, or the continued macroeconomic growth of emerging regions in Asia/Pacific, EMEA is more exposed to the global weakness of enterprise spending on server infrastructure.”

The revenue in the x86 server segment in EMEA declined 3.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012, and the RISC/Itanium UNIX revenue segment fell 31.7 per cent year-on-year. The Other CPU segment was the only segment to grow in the fourth quarter.

Each of the top five server vendors in EMEA, with the exception of Fujitsu, had revenue and shipment declines. The technology segments’ figures show a dramatic bifurcation in the market with the vendors most exposed to the UNIX segment facing real challenges. The Other CPU segment was predominantly driven by IBM’s mainframe refresh, but even this high-end strength was not enough to compensate for the weakness elsewhere.

“The fourth quarter 2012 in EMEA ended another poor year for the market with revenue levels falling to a level lower than those in the fourth quarter of 2009,” said Mr O’Connell. “This year is likely to be more positive, but it will remain a fiercely competitive environment. The vendors most exposed to declining high-end segments will face the biggest challenges.”

Analysts to Discuss Future BPM Trends at Gartner Business Process Management Summit 2013, 13-14 March in London, UK and 2-4 April in National Harbor, MD

Seventy per cent of high-performing companies will manage their business processes using real-time predictive analytics or extreme collaboration by 2016, according to Gartner, Inc.

One of the more effective techniques for business process improvement is intelligent business operations (IBO), in which processes are “aware” of and can learn from a wide range of work interactions, their context and the situations around them. Once a situation is sensed, analytics can be applied actively or on-demand to predict the outcomes of potential changes.

“The impact of integrating real-time analytics with business operations is immediately apparent to business people because it changes the way they do their jobs,” said Jim Sinur, research vice president at Gartner. “The most dramatic change is the increased visibility in how the company is running and what is happening in its external environment. Individual contributors and managers have more situational awareness, so they are able to make better decisions faster.”

As a result, organisations with real-time analytic and decision management capabilities perform better. Improved situational awareness leads to better and faster decision making and superior customer service, revenue growth, cost reduction and risk avoidance. Gartner said that virtually every business operation has one or more areas where real-time analytic services or active analytics should be applied.

“It has been technically possible to implement real-time analytics in transactional and record-keeping operational applications for decades. However, few business processes or operational applications have actually used them until recently,” said Mr Sinur. As the sources of business event data proliferate and business application management, complex event processing, rule management, visualisation, business process management (BPM), optimisation and other software tools improve, IBO is rapidly becoming a more practical and popular solution.

“Human or automated actions can be initiated for proper decision making to achieve the desired business outcomes. If the situation dictates, knowledge workers can collaborate in and around the process, case or instance to decide on and effect change,” said Mr Sinur. “We fully expect more organisations to leverage IBO in the future, resulting in innovative differentiation and higher performance. An example is work routing based on incoming arrival rates, where the knowledge required and skills needed are dynamically matched against resources available in-house, with dynamic expansion to non-employee resources as needed.”

Many organisations are finding at least one critical process that has appropriate leverage for higher performance, examples include intelligent fleet management and intelligent prescription management processes. Gartner said IBO will be a significant differentiator for high-performing companies and it promises to deliver new differentiating processes that will impact on both new and established industries.

The demand for IBO will drive an increase in intelligent technologies and the methods that surround active intelligence. This includes various combinations of event, business rules, analytics, social collaboration, dynamic processes and visualisation software, packaged to support various types of problems.

Gartner advises business process directors and solution architects in all types of organisations (if they haven’t already done so), to assess their organisations’ likelihood of adopting IBO for a critical or differentiating process. This will then allow them to investigate IBO-related technologies, look for opportunities to carry out an IBO proof of concept and pilot IBO on at least one process in the next two years. At the same time, it is advisable to undertake a scan of competitors to establish if they are leveraging IBO against their organisations.

For a more detailed analysis see “Predicts 2013: Business Process Improvement Leaders Need to Stop Tackling the Tactical and Get Strategic” This analysis is available on Gartner’s web site at http://www.gartner.com/resId=2258215.

Jim Sinur will discuss in more detail how IT leaders can leverage modern technology in BPM and sell BPM programmes to the C-suite at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit 2013, 13-14 March, in London, UK. For more information please visit europe.gartner.com/bpm for more information. Members of the press can register to attend the Summit in London by contacting rob.vandermeulen@gartner.com. The US Summit is taking place in National Harbor, Maryland, US on 2-4 April 2013, please visit www.gartner.com/us/bpm for more information. Members of the press can register to attend this event by contacting Janessa.rivera@gartner.com. You can also follow the events on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Gartner_inc using #GartnerBPM.

Canon Europe, world-leader in imaging solutions, offers congratulations to Swedish photographer, Paul Hansen, winner of the World Press Photo of the Year 2012. His image, which shows a group of men carrying two children through a street in Gaza City to a mosque for a burial ceremony, was chosen from a total of 103,481 images.

The World Press Photo Contest, universally acknowledged as the world’s most prestigious competition for photojournalists, has been sponsored by Canon since 1992. Now in its 56th year, the competition saw a record 5,666 professional photographers from 124 countries submit their images. The jury, led this year by Santiago Lyon, vice president and director of photography at The Associated Press, awardedprizes in nine themed categories to 54 photographers, with one image being selected as World Press Photo of the Year 2012.

“We’re proud to have been supporting the World Press Photo and amazing photojournalistic talent from around the world for over 20 years,” comments Kieran Magee, Marketing Director, Professional Imaging, Canon Europe. “We are passionate about the power of image and Paul’s winning image is undeniably and strikingly powerful. We warmly congratulate Paul and all this year’s other winners in the competition that sets the standard for photojournalism worldwide.”

The winning image was taken in Gaza city, Palestinian Territories, on 20 November 2012. It was shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III digital SLR camera.

Hansen will receive a cash prize of €10,000 from World Press Photo at an awards ceremony in Amsterdam. In addition, Canon Europe will provide him with a professional DSLR camera and lens kit.

Canon Ambassador Paolo Pellegrin, Magnum Photos, was also honoured by the World Press Photo of the Year jury. He took second place in the General News Stories Category, and will receive a Golden Eye Award and a diploma.

The prize-winning pictures are presented in an exhibition visiting more than 100 cities in over 45 countries. The first 2013 World Press Photo exhibition opens in Amsterdam on 26 April 2013.

One of the on-going trends this year is the continued need for people, on both the private and business front, to be mobile. They want to have their information within arm’s reach, or better yet, in their pockets. They want to be able to make decisions immediately without the hassle of accessing their desktop PCs or waiting to have the printed materials in their hands.

Companies have to adapt their systems as their employees demand a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) enabled environment. An exercise that has an impact on everything from the organisations security systems and software, to its everyday office equipment like printers.

It’s likely that mobility will continue to be a game-changing factor for the foreseeable future. The number of mobile users is set to reach more than 54.2 million by 2017 according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index Forecast, with mobile data traffic growing tenfold over the next five years.

From a business intelligence point of view, imagine just how powerful a data analysis tool could be when the benefits of mobility combine with the sourcing of business insights, on the go and in real time. While there are applications available in the market that have helped us dip our toes into business intelligence mobility, until now these have basically been front-end applications with no real power in terms of actually delivering analysis and insights.

SAS recently released its SAS Mobile BI application for both iPad and Android that is more than just a front-end window to business intelligence. With SAS Visual Analytics powering the application at the back-end you can now have access to very sophisticated analytics at your fingertips, including results from correlations, regressions and forecasting to make insightful decisions while on the go.

This means that answering questions and making decisions doesn’t have to stop just because you are away from the office. Business Analytics mobility gives decision makers access to servers, allows them to navigate folder structures and download selected reports with ease, without having to depend on others. Having on-the-go access to current, relevant information means faster decision cycles and uninterrupted workflows without delays.

From a collaboration point of view, mobility allows the easy sharing of idea while saving valuable time. For example, screen captures of reports can be annotated and emailed to a group who can add their thoughts as well. Or comments can be captured via video and audio and then shared.

An important added benefit of a powerful business intelligence mobile application is based on the fact that internet access is never a guarantee. Even in todays wired and wireless world there are times when internet connectivity fails and that is when mobile tethering allows people to explore and interact with reports and visualisations wherever they are.

In a nutshell: Business Analytics + mobility = uninterrupted business.